


These battle scars don't look like they're fading (Don't look like they're ever going away)

by hannahhoppers



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canon Divergence, Eventual CS, F/M, Self Harm, Suicide Attempt, trigger warning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-04
Updated: 2016-07-04
Packaged: 2018-07-20 01:35:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 2,914
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7385659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hannahhoppers/pseuds/hannahhoppers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Trigger warning for self harm and depression.</p><p>Emma Swan has always used her blades and her wrists as a way of escaping the emotional pain. It’s a trade-off she’s been willing to make her entire life. He’s the only one who tries to convince her not to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 1998- 15 years old

**Author's Note:**

> I have this theory that the reason Emma's just about always in long sleeves and wearing bracelets is because she self harmed/harms. I know it's not canon (We've seen her wrists up close without the sleeves in 4x04) but I think it should've happened. It would've added even more depth to her character, and it's realistic. I've decided to write that fic.
> 
> Title from "Battle Scars," by Guy Sebastian and Lupe Fiasco.
> 
>  
> 
> I don't own the show or the characters, so I'm playing with them. Adam and Eddy have such nice toys. Unbeta'd. Kudos and comments if you enjoy!

        Emma Swan was not a weak person. She didn’t do it because she was weak, she did it because she needed an outlet. This was an outlet for a teenager. Teenagers under constant supervision from the government couldn’t get their hands on drinks or drugs. Blades weren’t difficult, though. It was rare that she found a foster parent who even noticed; if they did, they would pretend they didn’t. Nobody wanted to discuss her issues. She made sure to wear long sleeves if she knew her social worker was coming.

 

        She stood over the bathroom sink with a knife she had swiped from the kitchen, and cut into the skin on her wrist. She needed the control the knife gave her, the control she didn’t have over any other aspect of her life. She needed somebody to punish for what had happened to her, so she punished herself. Nearly every night, she’d slice into her skin. One slit for the mother who gave her away. One for the father. Two for the Swans, who had given her away when she was just old enough to retain a few memories of them. One for the Swans’ child who took away her chance at happiness. One for her social worker, who tried but didn’t do well enough. One for every home she had been dumped in. One for each pretend sibling she had in the place she was at, now. One for her stand-in mother who didn’t care. One for the not-really father who drank too much beer and smoked inside the house. One for herself, for not being good enough.

 

        Blood and tears swirled together on the white porcelain of the sink. She rinsed the stuff off her newest blade before putting it in her pocket to put with her belongings. She hoped the mother wouldn’t notice it missing. She made sure to clean the coppery liquid out of the sink bowl; the other foster kids never liked seeing it in there in the morning. She made sure to wait until the bleeding stopped before going back to the bedroom she shared with the other girls, else she’d get blood on the sheets. Things never went well for her when she left blood on the sheets. 

 

        She crept into her room and slid under the cheap, scratchy sheets on the third bottom bunk. Sweet little Erin dozed above her, unknowing of the older girl’s pain. Emma laid in bed with her thumbs pressed against the freshest cuts, the sting comforting. When those went numb, she pressed agains the ones from the night before, and the night before. When her arms stopped burning and she couldn’t find any more still-red cuts among the white lines from the old ones, she let herself drift off. 


	2. 2000- 17 years old

        Neal had never brought it up. He had seen her scars, she made sure of it. Every so often, when they were laying in the bed of a stolen motel room, he’d trace the lines, but he’d never ask. She almost wished he would, but a part of her was glad he didn’t. 

 

        One afternoon they’d been wandering around on the outskirts of Chicago when she felt like the world had crashed around her ears. While Neal bought her an ice-cream from the cart at the park, she watched as a family played on the playground. A couple with cinnamon colored skin had their arms around each other as they watched a little blonde girl was swinging back and forth on the swings. A girl who looked just like she had, around 13 years ago. A little girl who had clearly been adopted into a family that loved her. Exactly the way Emma hadn’t. She ate her ice cream and joked around with Neal, pretending she was alright. He was none the wiser. As soon as they had found lodgings for the night, though, she disappeared into the bathroom with a SmoothGlide razor and her tears. He found her like that, new lines scratched into the skin. He turned around and went to the car, and came back 15 minutes later with a box of bandaids. She heard the thin cardboard drop onto the linoleum next to her, and his footsteps retreating without a word. She rinsed off the skin and hid her pain with three brown strips of adhesive and fabric. 

 

        The same type of incident occurred several times over the year and a half she knew him. He never asked, never begged her not to slice open her own skin. He’d simply drop a box of bandaids next to her on the floor and walk away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the angst. I've never like Neal. I created some moments out of a time in her life that we haven't seen much of. The next chapter is darker.


	3. 2001- 18 years old

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warning for an (unsuccessful) attempted suicide. Please don't read if this is a problem.
> 
> I warned you it would get darker.

        In prison, the thing she wanted most was a blade. A blade to replace the emotional pain she felt with the physical kind. But the guards had seen her wrists, and took extra care to make sure she couldn’t harm herself. She wasn’t even allowed to use plastic knives to cut up the bland food they served her. The day she got out of jail, she walked to one drugstore and bought four bottles of pain killers. She went to another and purchased a set of paring knives; cheap, small, and sharp. In silence, she went back to the halfway house she had been relocated to and locked herself in the bathroom. 

 

        She made cut after cut, losing count after the first 20. When she could no longer feel her left wrist, she started on the right. The blade cutting into the skin, for the parents who didn’t want her, the families who never loved her, for the social workers who hadn’t helped her, for the man who had left her, for the guards who had mocked her, for the child who had trusted her and who she gave away to live a life as bad as she had. Another woman pounded her fist against the door, demanding she be let in. Emma didn’t move. After several more minutes of banging and yelling, the woman left. She thought she was safe until another woman rapped against the wood, then another. Eventually, she heard keys clicking around inside the lock, undoing the fragile security measure she had created. The old woman in charge shooed the other probationaries away and pulled Emma to her feet. She pulled a hand towel off of the bar and pressed it against the young woman’s wrists, muttering under her breath. Once the blood had dried and the towel ruined, Emma was sent up to bed. 

 

        She pulled out the receipt from the painkillers, scribbled “I have nothing left to live for,” and tossed it on the bed. The first bottle was difficult to open, but she managed. She slid pill after pill down her throat, hoping to whatever deity might be listening that her next life would be happier. The second bottle was easier to crack. She made it a quarter of the way through before her eyelids fluttered shut. What she had hoped was the cold hand of death overtaking her was actually just unconsciousness, and her roommate found her lying on the thin carpet with dropped pills scattered around her. Emma didn’t hear the scream, or feel the paramedics frantically trying to pump the pills out of her stomach, but she smelled the sterility of the hospital when she woke three days later. 

 

        Her time in the mental ward wasn’t much different from her time in prison. The psychiatrists didn’t manage to convince her to open up for seven months. She was under constant surveillance, the orderlies and doctors trying to prevent her from taking her own life, not understanding that it was the only thing she wanted. Nobody tried to convince her that she could be okay. Nobody told her she was worth her life. Nobody tried to heal her, they just tried to make her “better,” tried to make her into another success story. She put on an act, a mask carefully formed after years of pretending for the benefit of others, and it worked. The well-meaning doctors came to the conclusion that they had cured her. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not entirely clear on whether Emma would have actually been sent to a halfway house at the end of her prison sentence, or what the rules are when it comes to mental institutions/halfway houses/jailtime. I may have bended the rules for the sake of story. 
> 
> Also, I doubt that this is what most mental institutions are like. I'm sure that they're filled with wonderful staff and doctors who truly do want their patients to get better, but painting them this way created a better story and more emotional damage. I have nothing against psych ward patients, doctors, orderlies, staff, etc.


	4. 2012- 29 years old

        It had been quite a while since she had cut. She tried to force the thought away any time it came to the front of her mind. She had made a promise to a stranger, a teenaged barista at a café in Boston, that she wouldn’t take her pain out on her arms. She couldn’t see any lines on his wrists, but she could see pain in his eyes. Since her stint in the psych ward, she tried to forget about her scars, covering them with jackets and bracelets (and a shoelace). She was fairly certain that her parents _God how strange was that to say_ hadn’t noticed, and neither had Henry. If she knew she couldn’t wear her red leather armor she made sure to paint over her pain with as much foundation as she could. 

 

        She did not have her foundation with her atop the beanstalk. She didn’t anticipate the need for somebody to see her arms. As Hook tied the cloth around the shallow cut across her palm, his eyes snagged on her scars. He touched a few lines gingerly with a fingertip.

 

“I’m sorry, love.” She nearly dismissed the sincerity in his eyes as pity. But she didn’t. She wanted to thank him for noticing, for saying something, for reacting _right_. But she didn’t.

 

“It was a long time ago. It doesn’t matter. Let’s go get a compass.” She turned away, refusing to acknowledge the sadness carried in his voice. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one's slightly better, to make up for the last one. I promise it will end well. Probably.


	5. 2016- 33 years old

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warning again for suicide contemplation (and kind of success- she dies but not really)

        She hadn’t meant to. But after she had run Killian through, after she had _killed him_ , she needed an outlet. Destroying toasters wasn’t enough. She disappeared into her blue house, carrying a small knife, and walked through each room, leaving a red trail behind her. A trail marking how much pain she was able to let out through her arms, but it wasn’t enough. The pain was still inside her, scrunched up into a little hard ball inside her chest. She needed to force some of it out of her, set it free into the universe, otherwise she’d explode. She’d clean up the mess later. 

 

        She had sat, for a long while, on the couch, considering joining him. Hook. Killian. The man she loved. Going to him in the underworld, never to be parted again. But she had a son to think about. Her parents. Her friends. She had finally found her home; was she willing to lose it in order to find him? She couldn’t find the will to tip the scales either way and fell asleep on the couch, the knife just out of reach on the glass coffee table. Nightmares and whispers plagued her sleep and eventually she rose, using magic to cover her old cuts and the new. She confronted Gold. Her family made a plan. 

 

        As she watched Gold drag the blade against his hand, she did her best not to fidget with her own wrists. The sight of blood dripping down was so familiar to her, she almost didn’t understand when her family flinched. Then she remembered that they hadn’t been dragging sharp edges across their forearms the majority of their lives. _I guess those doctors didn’t really cure me,_ she thought bitterly as she waded into the icy lake. _Considering I’m going to the land of the dead._ The metaphor was fascinating; being dead, but really alive, in comparison to all those years ago when she had been alive, but really dead. Hope could do that to you, she supposed. 


	6. 2016- 33 years old

        He was alive. She was alive. Neither was the dark one. They were okay. Everything should have been fine, but it wasn’t. Something felt off. Her chest felt heavy, full breaths were always harder to get in, her smile was a little too tight to put on. She remembered feeling this way, 15 years ago when she was lost and alone. It made her feel guilty, now, because she should be happy. Killian was here, and she had her parents and her son and a home. 

 

        Early one morning, she woke from a nightmare. It was Killian. Killian, with a gash in his neck and a sword in his stomach, Killian, hate in his eyes directed at her, Killian, beaten and bloody by Hades, no chance of getting out of the underworld. She rolled out of bed as quietly as she could and locked herself in the bathroom. She picked the razor up off the shelf in the shower and dragged it across her skin, needing to feel the bite of it and see her own blood leak out of the cracks. Tears falling freely, she dropped the blade. She had magic. 

 

        Fingers alight, new, deep lines opened on her flesh, burning away the skin and opening it practically to the bone. She made sure to leave it stinging, the pain something she could control. She was in control. Killian found her that way, curled up on the floor next to the bathtub, razor a few feet away, tears streaming down her face and a bloody puddle around her. 

 

“Oh, Emma.” He kneeled by her side. He pulled her into his lap and held her while she cried, murmuring her name over and over and whispering that she would be alright. Eventually, after minutes or hours but he didn’t care how long, she ran out of tears. She sat numbly against him, wrists dropped in her lap and still bleeding, his arms tight and protective (and loving) around her. “Can you stand, love?”

 

“I…” she tried, but she couldn’t speak. She nodded instead. Killian stood and pulled her to her feet, and they walked over to the sinks. His arm was tight around her shoulder, holding her up. He picked her up and set her on the counter, like a small child, and ran her arms under warm water. It ran red for a while, but her wrists stopped bleeding and the water gushed out from beneath her clear. He pumped soap onto a washcloth and rubbed it gently over her arms, wincing when she hissed.

 

“I’m sorry, love. Just don’t want it to get infected.” He kept lathering her skin, getting bubbles on, in, and around each gash. When he was certain that her arms were clean, he ran them under the faucet again, running his fingers up and down her forearms to make sure they were sterilized. “Where do we keep the bandages?” She gave a watery smile and pointed to the medicine cabinet. Where do _we_ keep the bandages- such a normal question, but it meant he was here. This was _their_ home. He pulled out two spools of gauze and wrapped them around her cuts, around and around and binding up her pain. 

 

“Thank you,” she blurted as he was taping the dressing down.

 

“For what, love?”

 

“For not- running. Or something.”

 

“Why would I run?”

 

“Everybody else has,” she replied, and she watched his eyes fill with pain. 

 

“Emma, I don’t know how many times somebody has run, or pretended this isn’t real. But they were wrong to do so. You are special, and perfect in so many ways, and it cuts me to my core that nobody ever tried to help take away your pain. I told you a while back that it was my job to protect your heart, and I’m sticking to that, love. I’m here for you, alright? I’ll always be here to bandage you up, or to hold you when you need it, or to just be there. Whatever you need, Swan. I’m here.” He wiped away a few tears, dribbling down her face. “Let’s get you back to bed, Emma.” 

 

        She nodded and he picked her up off the counter, cradling her in his arms. He carried her over to the bed and arranged the covers over her, kissing her forehead before walking around to the other side and slipping under the sheets. She cuddled next to him and dozed off. 

 

        When the morning sun poked through the crack between the curtains, she awoke and stretched. She rolled over to face her love, his blue eyes loving and questioning.

 

“Hook, what’s wrong?”

 

“I’m still just trying to figure out why you’d do this to yourself, Swan,” he murmured, fingering the bandages he had put on her a few hours before.

 

“I started doing it when I was a teenager. I just needed an outlet. I didn’t have any friends, or anybody, really, that I could talk to about my problems, so I took it out on myself. And when I was sitting there with a razor or a knife, I was in control. There was never any other time where I was in charge that way, so I started doing it more and more, just so I could have power over some little thing.” 

 

“Oh, Emma.” His eyes were overflowing with emotion. He pressed a kiss to each arm, before telling her, “I need you to make a promise, love.”

 

“What’s that?”

 

“Next time you feel the need to do this, I want you to take my arm and cut as many times as you would yourself.” 

 

“Wh- Why would you want me to do that to you?”

 

“Because it would hurt less than seeing you hurt yourself that way, Swan.” She teared up. Nobody in her life had ever cared for her that way. She kissed him quickly, nodding and trying not to cry.

 

“I promise.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And now we're done! It took some reworking, but I'm happy with how this came out. I hope you all enjoyed!
> 
>  
> 
> I want to add something. All of you are wonderful and perfect. I hope nobody who reads this ever feels the need to slice into their own skin. If you do, please try to talk to somebody. I'm not saying you have to get professional help (although if you can, you should), but find somebody to open up to. I know that it's the hardest thing, sometimes, telling somebody about your pain, but it will help. Hugs and kisses to you all. <3


End file.
